Motivation

Earlier this quarter, I was at a training held by the Center of Teaching and Learning (CTL). Among other things, this particular training discussed the importance of names and pronouns in building a personal connection with peers. The opening exercise was, then, to share the story behind our own names.

After listening to the responses of my peers, I grew fascinated with the topic. The outgrowth of that fascination became the piece you are reading now — the names of Stanford. Names, to be clear, are very peculiar objects. In fact, there is an entire flavor of philosophy that attempts to answer questions regarding the meaning and necessity of names, with possible resolutions found in meta-linguistic considerations.

But, setting aside the semantics, names offer a very real social snapshot into a people, a place and an era. Indeed, names, fancifully called eponyms, often bear the influence of transformative world leaders, awe-inspiring places and, as of late, even the occasional Paramount drama. Investigating names at Stanford therefore offers a unique exploration into the rich tapestry of human identity and, moreover, its intersection with academia. In this article, we take a brief look at descriptive statistics and have some fun along the way.

The Michaels of Stanford

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a couple of Stanford students had the idea of connecting every Michael on campus into a single Facebook group. And this wasn’t limited to your average Michael! Indeed, derivatives such as Miguel, Michelle or Michelangelo were also warmly embraced in this burgeoning circle of soon-to-be friends. The “Mike-all campus” was a rather short-lived group that quickly died down following the eventual return to campus. Nevertheless, it does raise at least one question of interest: Just how many Michaels are there at Stanford?

Methods

To investigate the names of Stanford, The Daily obtained a list of Stanford students and faculty from Stanford’s Google Contacts directory. We processed the data using the SpaCy Named Entity Recognizer to filter out organizations that crept in. Unfortunately, while the model has a high bar for categorizing named entities as people, it occasionally struggles to disentangle people from other entities such as organizations.

Key visualizations

Now we get to the fun part! First things first, the answer to “How many Michaels are there at Stanford?” is — drum-roll please — a staggering 531. This means that Michael tops the list of most popular names at Stanford.

First name	Count
Michael	531
David	508
John	385
Daniel	334
Andrew	306

Of course, there are things to look into beyond the raw counts. For one, how long is the average name at Stanford? The answer is, it turns out, between five and six letters. It is also worth pointing out that all of the top five names are typically considered masculine names.

Or, maybe you’re wondering what the most common initials are? Upon plotting the counts, we arrive at the following. Curiously, a lot of people have names starting with A (Andrew), M (Michael), J (John) and S (Sarah). On the flip side, defying personal expectations, first names starting with U (Uma) are the least common, beating out the other obvious choices like X (Xin) and Z (Zach) by a significant margin.

Taking a look at the frequency of first names, we arrive at the following word cloud visually depicting the names of Stanford.

A human touch

While the summary statistics are a curious novelty, we want to take the space to recognize that names carry deep personal, cultural and historical significance that extends well beyond a particular string of letters. That is to say, every Michael is their own, unique person! For Yvonne Ngo, the assistant director for tutoring and student learning programs, her last name used to be a source of embarrassment and confusion. However, through the years, Yvonne would eventually gain an appreciation for the rich history surrounding her last name.

“Ngo not only signifies my heritage, but also symbolizes the hurdles my parents encountered in their youth,” she said. “It is a testament to their resilience and the complex connection between identity and history in our family story. Today, I take pride in my last name, embracing it and its influences on my identity.”

In this same spirit, the “story of your name” activity has become a key icebreaker among CTL tutors. Yvonne believes that as each person unveils the layers of meaning behind their names, we can create an inclusive space where people appreciate the diverse backgrounds that make up our community.

Beyond connecting members of our community, names also serve as key anchor points for our own identity.

“My name … means ‘the sky,’” said Akash Shah ’26. “To me, this is one of the most important aspects of my identity.”

“Metaphorically, the sky represents a lot of my personal values. As a vast, never-ending expanse of space that encompasses not only the earth, but everything we as humans can see and imagine, the sky symbolizes limitless and never-ending opportunities for growth and expansion as well as an unrestrained freedom to pursue whatever I set my heart to,” Shah said.

In essence, names are not mere labels we use to address each other, but rather symbols that have the power to connect communities and our sense of self.

Future work

In the future, we would like to look into the temporal trends concerning names at Stanford. That is to say, how has the distribution of names at Stanford changed over the past few decades? Another fun direction is to infer demographic information from the first and last names. Upon doing so, we might find that interesting patterns emerge across ethnic lines. At the very least, the United States Census Bureau seems to think this is the case. But, alas, for brevity’s sake we will end our discussion here (for now).